


flight of the BEE-008

by cybercrow (clockworkcorvids)



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games), Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Genre: Adam Jensen-Centric, Adam-Centric, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Body Horror, Classical Music, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Extended Metaphors, Flight of the Bumblebee, Gen, Introspection, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Self-Reflection, Violinist Adam Jensen, Violins, and a pain in the ass to replace, and all that funky shit, aug dysphoria, bc id have a breakdown if i broke all those strings, but i hesitate to call it that bc i dont use that word lightly, existential unease, i sure hope adam's salary is good, idk what else to call it though, mostly because theyre fuckin expensive, no beta we die like men, the feeling of your body not being your own, the pain of something you love being just out of your reach, this is really niche
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:49:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24735676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockworkcorvids/pseuds/cybercrow
Summary: Adam’s violin is still there when he finally claws his way, definitively and irrevocably, into the world of the living. It goes untouched, the case collecting a fine layer of dust, for almost a month.He can’t bring himself to make it past opening the case and staring at the delicate instrument, always to be handled with care, and then staring at his brand new hands, which feel like they aren’t quite part of his body yet.
Relationships: past Adam Jensen/Megan Reed
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21
Collections: Quote Prompt Memes





	flight of the BEE-008

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [planetundersiege](https://archiveofourown.org/users/planetundersiege/pseuds/planetundersiege) in the [quoteonlyprompts](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/quoteonlyprompts) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> "The violin is a strong instrument, able to make the most diverse and fiercest of sounds, yet it is still easily broken. Your heart is like a violin."
> 
> * * *
> 
> the title is a shameless parody of flight of the bumblebee, which you probably recognize because it's super fast and everyone and their mother likes to flex by trying to play it. if i have to watch one more shitty mainstream talent show performance of it i might perish on the spot but it is actually a very nice piece. [this version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkvmboMSs44) is by the iconic violinist isaac stern  
> also, please talk to me about music, especially the violin,,,,, i can ramble for hours, and not just about all the times i did stupid shit like breaking a string the first time i tried to tune with the pegs. this is why you start with a cheap violin, kids B)
> 
> more info in the end notes if you want further explanation on the violin-heart metaphor, because i definitely don't take things too seriously at all, ever, really, i have no idea what you're talking about, i -

Adam’s violin is still there when he finally claws his way, definitively and irrevocably, into the world of the living. It goes untouched, the case collecting a fine layer of dust, for almost a month. He knows how important it is; knows, deep down, that playing again will bring him back to something comforting and familiar. He knows it’ll relieve some of his stress. He can’t bring himself to make it past opening the case and staring at the delicate instrument, always to be handled with care, and then staring at his brand new hands, which feel like they aren’t quite part of his body yet.

He sits down on his couch, the case laying open before him on the coffee table - an offering he cannot accept in good conscience, not yet - and he thinks about crying, but he doesn’t. If he looks into what’s left of the mirror in his bathroom, the eyes - his eyes, but he’s not ready to call them that - are hidden by the shades. If he were crying, he thinks the tears would just well up inside. They’d collect, blocking out his vision, like if he were underwater. 

Cybernetic fingers shake as he closes the case, zips it up, places it carefully back in the spot it won’t move from for a while. Instead of risking the possibility of breaking it, like all the other things he has broken - he breaks everything he loves, doesn’t he, when he gets too close - he instead takes to disassembling watches. He has no emotional connection to pawn shop clockwork. It’s easy for him to break and hard for him to fix, and most importantly, it’s disposable. He doesn’t mourn, just moves onto the next piece when he inevitably fails. Mistakes teach him, as they have throughout his journey of learning the violin. There are some mistakes he’s afraid to make, though.

The next time he picks up the violin case, after two months of being whatever the hell he is now, dust comes off, smudging on his hands and floating in the air. 

The first time he tries to play it, he wants to cry. He doesn’t, but he almost drops the instrument, and then he comes too close to crushing it between his chin and shoulder because he hadn’t thought about how hard the surface of his arms is, and he clenches his jaw too strongly. 

Adam breaks five strings - three E strings and two A strings - trying to relearn vibrato. He hasn't broken an E string, at least not due to his own lack of fine motor control, since he was a kid first learning how to tune with the pegs instead of the fine tuners. 

He flinches the first time, and the second, and the third. He doesn't flinch the fourth time, just sighs and gently puts down the violin and bow. The fifth time, the no-longer-taut metal flicks his chin, and it stings just a little, and the sensation startles him, but he doesn't flinch that time either.

He tells himself, after the second incident, that he should maybe focus on mastering his fine motor control on the lower, thicker strings first. But he's always been stubborn, and he's sure he can do it, he knows he can get the control of his new arms just right, from the shoulder to the elbow to the wrist and every single joint in his five digits.

And besides, after the fifth string - thank fuck for paid sick leave - he's starting to get the hang of it again. It being the vibrato itself, although it's lost any sort of distinctive, individualized quality it once had, and Adam suspects that's something he'll never get back. He hasn't yet figured out how to do a passable vibrato on more than a slow, isolated note. He can't do it in the midst of a piece, even the easy ones, especially not the fast ones, without knowing a string will snap under the force of his mechanical fingers, something he hasn’t yet learned to control.

There are a lot of things he hasn’t yet learned to control. Like his heart. It’s  ~~ not human  ~~ mechanical now, it’s not the one he was born with, but he’s still the same person, and he still feels the same emotions, they just manifest differently because they aren’t tugging on the same bits of flesh deep within his chest. 

Metal heartstrings must be stronger, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way when he’s sitting there, at some ungodly hour, silently shaking as he has another breakdown, another flashback, another nightmare.

"You play the violin. Right, son?” 

That’s the first thing Sarif had said to him, after the accident, when Adam was confined to a hospital bed. There had been bandages over his eyes. He couldn’t see. He knew, he’d been  _ told _ , that he had new eyes, new  _ everything _ , but it hadn’t hit him yet. He’d felt the sensation of the fabric against his eyelids, he’d felt how they were swollen and sore - he’d felt it more than he’d felt his new limbs, mostly but not entirely synched with the rest of his body yet. But his eyes had been closed, and he hadn’t seen the HUD yet, and in that moment, he could pretend nothing had changed. 

“Yeah,” Adam had replied, and it had been hoarse. Distracted. He’d been thinking about Kubrick, Megan, his apartment, his violin, everything he’d left behind. All the questions he didn’t have answers to.

“The violin is a strong instrument, able to make the most diverse and fiercest of sounds, yet it is still easily broken. Your heart is like a violin."

Adam had made a noncommittal noise, because he didn’t know what to say, and even though he felt that he had the energy to speak for a while, Sarif didn’t need to know that. And, well, he’s a perceptive man, but either Adam had bluffed well enough or Sarif had let it slide, because he just clapped Adam’s shoulder and told him to get well soon. 

Now, sitting in his apartment, carefully holding his violin on his lap with one hand lightly against the neck and one on the chin rest - it’s best to touch the instrument as little as possible, to avoid rubbing off the lacquer or dirtying it with the oils from one’s own skin - he thinks of what he should have said. 

(He also thinks, frequently, of what he should have  _ done _ , to avoid all this happening to him. To avoid losing Kubrick, Megan, his own body, everything.)

Yes, the violin is a strong instrument, and yes, it can also be easily broken, but it has strengths in places one would not expect. 

He raises it to eye level, looks at the bridge. It’s tilted slightly, not standing completely straight up, but not enough that he needs to fix it. He doesn’t think he trusts himself to fix it, anyways - he’d nearly broken a bridge trying to replace it back when he  ~~ was human ~~ had the hands he’d been born with. A fine layer of rosin dusts the surface of the instrument, nothing to be worried about, but he’s always been rather picky about letting too much build up. 

(He remembers Megan complaining about the noise, that  _ awful _ sound, when he cleaned the strings with a cloth after he played. It really is a terrible noise, but he’s used to it. He’ll hear it again. He doesn’t think he’ll ever hear her voice again, though.)

If he holds the violin at a certain angle, and peers through the F-holes - which he doesn’t, but he has before, and he knows what he’d see if he did it again - he can see the sound post. An innocuous little wooden cylinder, placed carefully under the bridge, stretching between the two wooden plates of the instrument, making it not-quite-entirely hollow. It’s so small, so fragile, but it holds so much weight. And in many languages, it’s called the soul of the violin, because it’s crucial to making the sound perfect, to holding the whole thing together. A small movement, of less than a millimeter, can change the instrument’s sound entirely. When the bridge is on the violin, with strings taut against it, they put over a hundred pounds of weight against the sound post. A child could stand directly atop it, and the instrument would be fine. It wouldn’t break.

_ That _ , Adam thinks, is what his heart is like. Strong, fierce, and easily broken in most places, but it holds him together with improbable strength at his very core.

After that, he practices every day. If there’s one good thing to come out of mandatory sick leave, it’s that he has all the time in the world - and he doesn’t break another string.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! <3
> 
> [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJhmCzm2NYo&t=694s) and [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27Pmgf3IIJo) are videos that discuss the anatomy of the violin (the second one is specifically about the bridge), including some interesting bits explaining why you can put a lot of weight on the bridge without destroying the violin


End file.
